Adela, generous woman, was almost as pleased as I was myself to learn of John Wedmore’s innocence.
‘You must bring him back here, Roger,’ she insisted. ‘Elizabeth can sleep with Nicholas and Master Wedmore can use her room for as long as he wishes to remain.’
‘No news of Master Jay’s expedition, then?’ I enquired.
Both Adela and Margaret Walker shook their heads.
‘They’ve been gone six weeks and more now and not a word of them being sighted anywhere,’ the latter announced with a lugubrious shake of her head. ‘Madness! Folly! I always said so. The Isle of Brazil! Who has actually laid eyes on it? No one that I can discover. It’s just a sailor’s yarn, if you want my opinion, like men and women with fishtails instead of legs. All nonsense! Ah, well,’ she added, glancing around at our reunited family group, ‘I’d better be getting back to Redcliffe, then, Adela. You won’t want me hanging around, I daresay, now that your husband’s back.’ She wagged an admonitory finger at me. ‘Look after her! She’s worth her weight in gold.’
‘Gold!’ shouted Adam, unexpectedly adding his mite, and giving all our ears a momentary respite from his whistle-playing. ‘Bad man,’ he continued, jutting his lower lip in my direction and demonstrating that, although only two years old, he was perfectly capable of following the unspoken drift of adult conversation.
Margaret smiled grimly, picking up the stick she used nowadays to help her walking, and headed for the door.
‘Perhaps I wouldn’t go that far,’ she grudgingly admitted. She ruffled my son’s dark hair. ‘But that father of yours does need keeping in order.’
Adam endorsed this by a blast on his whistle that speeded Margaret’s departure, set Hercules barking furiously and hurriedly drove the rest of us from the kitchen. But, all in all, it was good to be home.
I’d missed it.
I took Dame Audrea’s letter to Richard Manifold and gave him the honour of approaching such authority as he thought fit. It was a kindness on my part: he loved nothing better than to appear important and to bring himself to the attention of his superiors. And unlike his two henchmen, Jack Gload and Pete Littleman, he was efficient in whatever he undertook. My half-brother had been released from the bridewell by suppertime.
He looked paler and thinner than when I had seen him last and demonstrated a surprising lack of resentment for his unjust incarceration — to begin with, at least. He was too relieved for the present that his ordeal was over. Elation vied with despondency over the news that there was still no news concerning John Jay’s ship. (The prevailing view in the city was that it had been lost with all hands.)
Adela welcomed her new-found brother-in-law with a shy kiss and, it being Friday, one of her fish stews for supper, her warmth and kindliness making up for the children’s complete indifference. When I apologized for them, John merely laughed and said his younger brother, Colin, had always been the same with strangers. But mention of his brother plunged him once more into gloom and we finished supper in almost total silence on his part. This became so oppressive that, when the meal was over, Adela suggested that I take John to the Green Lattis, where a beaker or two — or even three — of their best ale might improve his mood.
Nothing loath, I walked my half-brother up Small Street in the sunshine of a warm August evening and found a favourite corner seat in the as yet deserted aleroom, secluded from the prying eyes of the dozens of after-supper drinkers who would soon be joining us.
John downed his first beaker very nearly in one gulp and, as Adela had foreseen, this considerably raised his spirits.
‘You see,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, ‘I was right to trust you to clear my name.’ He hesitated, then asked, ‘Would you be willing to tell me all about it? How you managed it. What happened exactly?’
There was no reason, I felt, why he shouldn’t be told the whole story. He had a right to know the fate of the young man whom he obviously resembled.
‘Very well,’ I agreed and fetched us another beaker of ale apiece. At the same time, I tried to persuade myself that I really wasn’t interested in proving to my young half-brother just how clever I’d been. (And, indeed, when I came to think about things in detail, I wasn’t so sure that I had been particularly clever in this instance.)
‘Right,’ I murmured, settling back on the bench beside him. ‘It’s complicated, so listen carefully.’
When I at last finished speaking, there was a long silence between us. The aleroom had filled up, and all around us, the chattering of Bristol voices, with their familiar, hard-edged, west country burr and Saxon diphthongs, was deafening. Still without speaking, John Wedmore signalled to a passing potboy to bring us another drink. And to my astonishment, we got it almost at once. (Potboys in the Green Lattis are often mysteriously afflicted with deafness and blindness when things get busy.)
‘So,’ my half-brother muttered at last, ‘the truth’s finally out. Anthony Bellknapp is exposed as the murderer he was and has been justly punished by George Applegarth.’ He emitted a little snort of mirthless laughter.
I regarded him curiously. ‘You sound as if you knew them,’ I said. ‘My powers of storytelling must be better than I thought.’
‘Oh, it’s not that,’ John answered, without, I’m sure, meaning to be rude. ‘The truth is, I did know them. Well, I knew the steward and his wife. But as for Anthony Bellknapp’ — he spat vigorously into the rushes — ‘I only had the misfortune of meeting him once.’
I digested this, sipping my ale, but quite unconscious of the fact as a suspicion slowly formed at the back of my mind.
‘What do you mean? What are you saying? That … that …?’
My half-brother nodded. ‘Yes. I do mean what you think. Dame Audrea didn’t make a mistake when she identified me as her page. I was John Jericho.’
It was now his turn to assume the mantle of storyteller while I listened, pushing aside my ale before my brain became too fuddled to understand what he was saying. I moved round to the other side of the table so that I could sit opposite him, occupying a stool just vacated by another customer.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘It was about two years after my mother had married Matthew O’Neill, and we’d gone to live in Ireland with him, that she told me who my real father had been; not Ralph Wedmore as I’d always thought, but your father, Roger Stonecarver. They’d been secret lovers and she said that whatever happened he’d promised to look after her. Perhaps he meant it. Masons and stone carvers have always been better paid than other trades, but in the end, whether he was sincere or not went for nothing. She was less than a month pregnant when he was killed. So she married my fa- She married her cousin, Ralph, who’d always been fond of her, and he brought me up as his own, although, looking back, I can see that he never really regarded me as his son. Especially not after Colin arrived, three years later.
‘Anyway’ — John paused to swallow a draught of ale — ‘the news of my true paternity came as a shock to me. I also learned that I had an older half-brother, Roger. I was then about sixteen, a time of life when who you are seems very important. I immediately decided to leave Ireland and return to Wells to try and find you. My mother pleaded with me not to go, Colin cried and begged me to stay, and even my stepfather — who rarely interfered in matters concerning us two boys — told me that he thought I was being over-hasty. He advised me to sleep on it, to consider my mother’s feelings, but I wouldn’t listen. I was too upset. I needed to get away.